Four strategies that help manage anxiety

In working to decrease your anxiety, it’s better to think of
changing your relationship with your thoughts rather than ridding yourself of it all
together.

People who have worries will often come into therapy and
claim they want their “anxiety to go away”. This is not possible. Even if you
were to take benzodiazepines which provide almost immediate relief from it, it has not gone away but is masked. In fact, it will be
back full force in a short time, perhaps worse than when you started to take
the drugs.

Strategies that help you manage anxiety deal with how you
interpret and interact with your thoughts, your body, and your environment.
They are strategies that change the way your brain functions, and when used
over and over again will become more natural to you than worrying.

Recognize the false signals

The first step of taking control of your worries is to
recognize when you are worrying. This includes paying attention to what is
happening in your body, as well as what is happening in your mind. This may
seem silly, but many of us walk around on automatic pilot. By the time we recognize we are worried we
have worked ourselves into a pretty uncomfortable state that’s hard to return
from.

The emotion of worry comes from what our mind is telling us,
and what our bodies are telling us. Unfortunately, our minds and bodies are
often giving us false signals.

The next time you are aware that you are anxious, ask
yourself:

·
How does my body feel?

·
How am I breathing?

·
What other things am I doing that are indicating
I am anxious ( i.e. smoking, drinking, eating).

Recognizing your physical cues of worry will help you to interfere
in the cycle sooner. Once you realize what your signs are, you can begin the
process of asking yourself some questions.

Interrupt the useless cycle of worry by problem solving

1.
What is my mind telling me to be worried about?

2.
What can I do to influence the outcome of this
worry?

If there is nothing you can do, than
worrying is an unproductive exercise, let it go. If there is something you can
do to impact the thing you are ultimately worrying about, then you can decide
to take action and then let it go because you have problem solved.

One of the paradoxical things about worry is
that it is intended to help keep us safe from harm. In modern day life however,
excessive worry does not keep us from harm but leads us into harm. It paralyzes
us from making good decisions, it clouds our intuition and problem solving abilities,
and it also can cause us to make poor decisions such as using drugs and alcohol
to manage it. Rarely does it motivate us
to make good choices, or prevent us from making bad choices. People who worry, however, have concluded on
some level that it is a useful exercise.

Containment

Another strategy that can help with worry is to isolate your
worry time to a certain portion of the day. If you have a constant generalized
worry that you feel like you can’t escape from, giving yourself “worry time”
Say for example, from 5-6 pm each night, can help with management of worry
during the day. When you find yourself worrying at other times, you tell
yourself to let that worry go until its “ worry time”.

During worry time, you can also use the problem solving
strategy above. Putting it on pen and paper is a great way to really illustrate
when you need to take action to address a worry and when it’s something you
should let go.

Check out what your mind is telling you

Often worries are built on my thoughts that are untrue. Asking
yourself if you know for certain the thoughts that are driving the worries are
true, can sometimes help you to decrease your anxiety. In fact, this is a
strategy that helps you to challenge all of your thoughts that might be
creating disturbing emotions, not just worries.

For example if you are having the thought that a meeting
will go in a disastrous way, or your boss will act in a certain undesirable
way, ask yourself if things might go another way. Are you sure those thoughts are true? Or the
other thoughts that are making you worry are true? What other thoughts might
you generate that would produce less distress?

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